Category Archives: Roundtable

This article in our series debating the Furry Canon is a roundtable discussion of Watership Down by Richard Adams, first published in 1972. Your panelists are JM, Jakebe and Huskyteer.

JM

Jakebe, Huskyteer

Thanks for letting me lead off this roundtable exploration of Watership Down for the [adjective][species] Furry Canon project. Jakebe, I know that this is a book close to your heart, as it is close to the heart of many lapine furries, and by asking me to read and comment you’re risking have me piss all over something personally important.

[adjective][species] regularly informally collaborates with the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP), a collection of psychologists and sociologists looking at the furry community. We are amateurs, they are professionals. We have the freedom to present anything we find interesting; they are constrained by the usual rules of academic engagement.

Nuka, a furry with a PhD in social psychology, is a long-time member of the IARP as well as an occasional contributor to [a][s]. In conversation about data (the best kind of conversation), he noted a surprising finding from his research:

“The IARP has found evidence that wearing ears (but not other accessories or fursuits) is particularly associated with depression and reduced self-esteem in furries.”

I used this interesting statistical tidbit during an [adjective][species] panel (Confuzzled 2015), as an example of a surprise hidden in the data: something you’d never expect, or think to look for. It provoked a few questions from the audience, which Nuka and I do our best to answer here.

Camio is an academic writer first and writer of fiction second, with a graduate degree in gender studies. They specialize in queer theory and popular media studies, and recently became a member of the Furry Writers’ Guild.

JM

Camio, thanks for participating in this roundtable review of Kristina Tracer’s Bonds of Silver, Bond of Gold. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about.

Bonds is a furry fantasy novel, following the travails of a young slave who ends up being instrumental in the resolution of a conflict between two neighbouring lands. The basic plot is breezy and fast-moving, but the real meat of Bonds is the exploration of sexual slavery. It’s challenging stuff.

Before we go any further, I’ll warn readers that our discussion will include spoilers. Bonds also has many explicit rape scenes, and we’ll be talking about those too.

Species choice is a question that interests us at [adjective][species] a great deal, and we know it interests the wider furry community. It is a choice that is at the core of the furry identity, one of the key building blocks toward the way we present ourselves within the furry community.

We have a wealth of data on species and character selection, thanks to many years of the Furry Survey and the work of the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP). We are able to correlate species choice with hundreds of different variables… yet we have been able to identify little tangible that drives a furry towards choosing, say, a wolf rather than, say, a horse.

I had a chat with Dr Courtney Plante (aka Nuka)—IARP researcher, furry, and [adjective][species] contributor—to explore what we have learned, and discuss why it’s such a difficult question in the first place.

Following the close timing of two events that caused a good deal of drama in the fandom (explained below), some of the [a][s] contributors exchanged e-mails to discuss the situations and what they and the response to them said about the fandom. Below is a slightly edited (mostly for clarity and continuity and to exclude the names of contributors who did not wish to be included) transcript of the e-mails that went around for a couple days, followed by “closing statements” from contributors who wished to make one. What follows are the opinions of the individual contributors, which should not be taken as any official position of [adjective][species], and which are offered in the spirit of [a][s]’s mission of figuring out just what the heck we are doing in this wonderful furry world of ours. As some of the contributors note, this topic is not particularly relevant to being furry, but it is relevant to the furry fandom.

Continue reading Reputation in the Furry Fandom: Zaush, Sasho, and Judgment by Social Media→

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[adjective][species] is a blog that takes a look at the furry fandom from the inside. The writings here come from a wide variety of furry authors, and cover any and all meta-furry topics that we can get our paws on.